


Keep Your Weathered Hands Busy

by shortitude



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (brief) Abigail Griffin, (brief) Kyle Wick, But Bellamy Loves Her Most, Established Relationship, Everybody Loves Raven Which They Should, F/M, Found Families, Pass it on, bilingual!Raven Reyes, like so brief and not really put under a nice light but what do you expect?, rbficexchange, unnecessary cameo by a (not) beloved song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 15:33:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5591617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortitude/pseuds/shortitude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of the things that people have given to Raven Reyes. (The ones that matter, anyway.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Your Weathered Hands Busy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).



> Dear kwritten: you had a lot of ideas in all your prompts and I LOVED THEM ALL, so I tried to do my best to include as many of them as possible in this fic. I hope you like it. There are winks to other fandoms, there are winks to tumblr's favourite braven headcanons, and there is a scene where sex _is at least attempted_. So you know what you're getting into. Other than that, please enjoy.

The first gift she ever gets is from Finn, and doesn’t come in a box with a bow on it.

She’s a hungry little thing, too young to be this angry at everyone who lets this sort of thing happen to little girls and little boys at all, yet angry enough that it sometimes keeps her under a false impression that she’s full. She’s a small little bird, that’s what Nygel calls her when her mom trades Raven’s rations for a bottle of hooch in front of her daughter’s big wide eyes. ( _We can share mine, mija, it’s alright,_ she says. _Mamá no necesita mucho, but I need this._ Agitated, she shakes the newly acquired bottle of moonshine in Raven’s face like she expects her daughter to understand. Raven understands what it’s like to not come first.)

Two days later, a boy from two doors down gives her an entire ration of bread. “I don’t need it. Do you wanna play?”

Her mother has taught her to never trust a sample that comes for free, but Finn Collins looks like she could knock him on his ass even as underfed as she is, and he has his own pair of dice.

Years down the line, she’ll tell you her first gift was not bread. It was family.

\--

She doesn’t think of the first model of the brace as a gift. Wick calls it a help, letting others pick up the weight on your shoulders and share it.

But then Wick looks at her like _that_ , and she sees hints of Nygel in him, and it almost makes her retch. She builds herself her own brace, when she’s strong enough to stand on her own after the surgery; stays up all night and builds it in the time she has between getting stuff for Abby and worrying about Finn. It nearly ends up with a couple of burnt fingers, but it’s worth it. She builds herself a brace, and that’s that.

\--

She has managed to go three hours without crying when Abby shows up with the urn. Even before she offers Raven a small smile, she already knows what’s in it. She knows _who’s_ in it.

Abby opens her mouth to say, “I thought you’d like—“

“Did you think, before you offered it to Clarke first?” Raven interrupts, her tone cold. She has no tears now; her heart has turned to stone.

“Raven,” Abby starts, apologetic and giving her an answer without saying the words. Raven shakes her head, cuts her good intentions off at the root, and yanks the urn from Abby’s hands wordlessly.

She cradles what is left of her family to her chest, and looks down. Dryly, she says, “Thanks.” Abby’s gift to her, this time, is welcomed silence.

\--

The next morning, she learns what companionship means, when it comes not because she’s useful to the cause, but because she is among the few who understand where they come from.

Bellamy doesn’t talk when they walk into the forest to find a good tree to scatter Finn’s ashes around. He looks up at the sky at one point – maybe wondering if he’ll see it again, see it be this blue again – and points at a bird flying overhead. “He’d like that.” They both pretend the bird is a raven, even if neither have seen one before.

An hour later, Bellamy leaves for Mount Weather. Her gift to him, later, will be honesty.

\--

There is a before and an after, there always is. That’s the principle of life, of the universe. Before Finn: hunger. After Finn: family.

 _After_   Finn: loneliness.

Before Aventine: anger.

\--

She doesn’t give enough thought to leaving Camp Jaha. There just comes a point when she looks back on the last year, counts the times she’s ended up being tortured, bleeding or crying, and decides that she has had enough. Once, she was a angry little girl who had to be taught how to laugh; the person who taught her is dead, his ashes scattered around a tree that got razed during a war that’s still haunting them. But she misses laughing, _oh_ how she misses it. She misses being happy.

So the morning she leaves the Camp, she doesn’t take more than she can carry with her.

It takes her three days to clear a path to a place that doesn’t fall on any territory; three days more to chop wood and clear the area, and a whole week to figure out how to build huts for everyone. Until then, they sleep in tents they pilfered from the wreckage of the dropship. It’s her and a handful of people who followed her out of Camp Jaha, each with their own reason. She doesn’t ask them, they don’t ask her. At night, they build a fire and make plans for how to build stuff.

On the second day of the trip, Octavia walks in the back with Raven, who is slower, and after they share a ration of dry meat, she digs something out of her bag.

“Here. You’ll need one of these, right?” she asks, and presses a screwdriver into Raven’s hand.

(The first thing she does with that screwdriver is let Octavia carve the name of their village on a tree.)

\--

Once the settlement feels less like a work in progress and more like a home, that’s when she realizes she’s been tired for two years and a half, but she’s finally somewhere she chose to be.

\--

Metal and wiring is what they become known for, what they end up trading with. As a result, they send out groups of people on scavenger hunts almost every month, on a cyclical basis: one group returns and another one leaves. Only once does she have to send one group out before the other has returned, because she doesn’t understand the hold-up. Two days later, both parties return, six people pushing a car and six people dragging an assortment of junk they’ve found.

“I bet you really love me right now,” is what Nate says to her first, head poking out from behind the rusty, opened, driver’s door.

“ _Car_ ,” she breathes out, and rushes to it to pop open the hood. It’ll need work – and _time_ \-- but god, she could get this running. Monty could make the fuel, then they’d be able to expand their expeditions and transport more stuff back, and the trade, oh the trade will surely grow as well, and –

“Oh yeah, she loves you,” Bellamy pipes up, his voice dry but warm, from the passenger’s side.

Raven is too busy cooing over a semi-functional hybrid engine to comment on the couple of nerds high-fiving each other behind the missing windshield.

\--

There are many reasons why life on the ground sucks, and one of them happens on a monthly basis.

Gradually, Ark-imposed birth control ends up expiring for everyone, which triggers a chain of events. The first baby born on Earth from Ark dwellers, for instance; though now they call themselves _skai kru_ because Octavia keeps insisting, even though she spits out the words she learnt from Indra most of the days. (Raven likes the idea of being people from the  <i>sky</i>.)

The babies aren’t the worst part – and honestly, Raven is generally okay with babies and children as long as they don’t storm into her workshop and risk losing a couple of fingers in the process, _or_ bother her during the precious little hours of sleep she gets – the worst part is the periods.

They’ve always been bad, as far as she’s concerned, but when her birth control expires, it’s like every single one she gets is the universe telling her _fuck you_ , through vicious cramps and the inability to walk for half a day.

The first time Bellamy stubbornly stays with her in bed, his warm hand over her stomach and his lips brushing her forehead every time he moves them as he reads to her, she wants to cry. Actually, the first time he does it, she doesn’t cry; but every month afterwards, when he keeps showing up, she leaves a wet stain on his shoulder that he doesn’t seem to mind one bit.

Later, when Harper comes up – with Monty’s help – with the idea of a DIY heating pad, and gives Raven the first version of it that doesn’t automatically burn the skin, she still prefers his hand to it. Then again, she prefers his hands over many things.

\--

Throughout the years, they will end up with a substantial collection of books. Some of them are bedtime stories put to dry parchment made from scraps of paper, which the children of the village love and which Bellamy loves reading to them, but most of them are books that end up in Raven’s hut because everyone knows her boyfriend is a sucker for actual books that survived actual nuclear war (even if not actually intact).

The first book that is just for her comes from the hands of Lincoln, after he returns from a long trip to the tribes in the West. He pushes it into her hands tentatively, as if the years that have passed between them have yet to build enough trust that he doesn’t still fear her, to some degree, and murmurs “I thought of your roots.”

It’s a dictionary. She remembers telling the story once around the campfire, after drinking alcohol just to prove to herself that she wasn’t like her mother at all, and she remembers that the next morning Lincoln told her she nearly spoke trigedasleng. She’d told him that all her mother left her was a very large collection of cusswords in Spanish.

The words on the cover are faded, and some of the pages are missing. But she opens it carefully, and goes to find the letter R, and there it is, not faded at all: **raven** _n_  : cuervo _nm_.

It’s the first time she hugs Lincoln, but somehow she thinks they both agree that it was worth the wait.

\--

Rebuilding the car and coming up with the right measures for biofuel takes time, but through a joint effort, Monty and Raven manage. His gift to her is that she gets to take it for a test drive first.

After the first drive, to make sure the fuel works and the engine holds together, the decide to test it on longer distances. Because Monty is essential to the village now that they’re rebuilding the greenhouse, she decides to go alone.

That is, until Bellamy joins her, a backpack full of food thrown on the backseat behind him and two blankets piled on top.

“Are you sure you even know how to drive it?” he asks, with a grin, his arm thrown over the back of her headrest.

“Haters get to walk back, Bellamy.”

\--

She has piloted space buckets plummeting to the ground; she can drive a car when all it takes is for her not to crash it into any tree. They drive for three hours until Raven decides to stop, because three hours by car is already about a day on foot at the speed she pushed it.

“I found this again.” The way that he pulls ‘this’ out of his pocket reminds Raven of the way he reached back for a handful of leaves when he tried to feed a two-headed deer that one time. It becomes clear to her why, when he opens his palm and in it she finds the raven pendant she thought lost in the exodus from Camp Jaha.

“When did –“

“I thought,” he adds, calmly, and reaches up to hang it over the rear-view mirror. “It would look well here.”

She knows she’s about to burst into stupid tears, so what she does instead is to lunge for him. He meets her half-way, pulling her into his lap easily, all obstacles considered. She doesn’t kiss him for the first few seconds, that’s not what happens; she breathes into him, breathes him in, her lips close to his but not touching, her gaze fixed on his.

She’s never said the words to him, but Bellamy has whispered them into the skin between her shoulder blades at night, when he thought she’d already fallen asleep. She’s made sure to show him, because _showing_ was more important to Raven than words, because people could use those words and hold them against you and you would give up on the stars for those three big words. But actions, they spoke louder than words.

She opens her mouth to say them now, and he leans up to kiss her lower lip.

“I know,” he murmurs, and catches her sigh when she crushes her lips to his, and crashes into him.

And she does.

She decides the best way to show him is to christen the car, right here, because she’s an impatient sort of tactile person. It’s getting dark outside, and it’s not like they’re going to draw any attention (she even killed the engine), so she takes off his shirt and takes off hers, rocking into him helped by the way the car seats are shaped.

It makes a moan stutter out of both their mouths, and her eyes shine with smug satisfaction. “I know, we should do this more often.” She rolls her hips again, and again, until he brings his hands up to hold onto them, and grinds himself up against her.

The pants are the problem, in the end. Until they get to their pants, it’s easy. He finds faded marks his mouth left there three nights before, and sucks on them until the skin blooms red and purple, alive. She runs shallow red lines down his back while he keeps moving his hips. Impatient, both of them, their dialogue becomes a succession of whispered _can you_ and _move that_ , and they’re triumphant as far as foreplay goes. He manages to sneak a hand down her pants and touch her through her underwear, but the fabric doesn’t let him move around more.

In the attempt to wrestle her out of her pants – “Just one leg, don’t you dare waste time with the brace right now” – she ends up losing her balance and falls sideways. Her elbow lands on the claxon, and she almost takes the car out of park. The _honk_ floods not just the car, but the area around them, sending critters scurrying away.

They both freeze, eyes wide open and lips parted.

“Was that –“

“I think,” she struggles to keep a straight face, “that was the chorus of _La cucaracha_ , yes.”

Their laughter is louder than the honk itself.

On the way home, she honks occasionally just to send them into an uncontrollable fit of giggles again. She remembers what it’s like, to laugh.

\--

It’s winter, and her hands are suffering the consequences of unforgiving winds and cold snow. Bellamy has been working on his knitting all year long, but there’s not enough wool in the land to make all of them mittens, so they’ve had to improvise; her melding gloves don’t keep the cold out, but she can’t build wall around the forge or she might blow it up.

They’re not the prettiest of hands, which is why she scoffs often when Bellamy insists on rubbing them with a healing salve Monty came up with (she thinks: he came up with it for everyone).

This is why she doesn’t understand why Octavia presses a braided leather bracelet into her hands.

“What’s this?” she asks, running her thumb over the small wooden medallion, upon which Octavia has carved a small wreath. No, wait, it’s too pretty and neat; Lincoln probably carved it, O doesn’t have the patience.

“It’s the Blake crest. Laurels.”

“I thought you had a boner for Greek stories.”

Octavia makes a noise and shakes her head, waving her dismissively. “That’s Bellamy. Me? I’ve always been a bigger fan of the Romans.” Probably because someone decided to call her Octavia, and feed her head with stories about the people staging coups on hills. “Anyway, now it’s yours.”

Raven looks down at the bracelet, runs her thumb over the (now) Blake family crest, and feels her heart expand.

“I know he’s been thinking of asking you, but won’t, because he knows how you feel about this sort of thing, but Raven? As far as I know, you’ve already been a part of the family for a long time now.”

It turns out that tying thin leather bands is very hard when you’re crying with how full your heart feels.

\--

Centuries from now, when she’s already dead, and if humankind doesn’t manage to fuck shit up again, she dreams of a forest that grows back in the place where she scattered Finn’s ashes.

Maybe, if she’s lucky, whoever is left alive of her family, will go and leave a ration of bread there every year.

It’s not impossible. Hers is a very large family.

**Author's Note:**

> I'M NOT CRYING, YOU'RE CRYING.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Keep Your Weathered Hands Busy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5627041) by [growlery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/growlery/pseuds/growlery)




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